@bagder In the distant past, Google Ads launched. They had two key features:

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They were text only, so they didn't slow down the page, were not annyoing, and were not a vector for malware.

They were selected based on the content of the page.

The first was great. I didn't mind seeing them anywhere. They replaced animated banner ads ('punch the monkey!') and were non-invasive, but they were visible. A lot of folks excluded them from ad blockers. I didn't block ads at the time, but I did block Flash and that meant that Google ads were about the only ones I ever saw.

The second was also very important. Ad targeting works on either some profile that they've built of me or the thing I'm currently looking at. These are the only options. The problem with the profile is that it's always a trailing indicator. If I'm looking at review sites for washing machines, there's a good chance that I want to buy a washing machine now, whereas nothing in my ad profile is likely to tell you that (unless it's harvested some post I made saying the washing machine broke down this morning, but if so it may have to act very quickly).

I believe the push to profile-based ads was driven by Amazon because they do work in specific categories. If I've bought a book by a particular author, I am quite likely to want another one. If I've bought two books by an author, there's a good chance I want to buy all of their books. The books I buy are probably correlated with the books people who bought some of the same books as me will buy (the down side is that Amazon didn't know which books I already owned and so would recommend pages and pages of books I owned).

It works far less well in general. Just because I bought a 128 GB USB flash drive does not, it turns out, mean that I want to be shown hundreds of ads for other USB flash drives. If you could show me those ads before I bought one, that might be useful, but afterwards it's a waste of everyone's time.

I clicked on quite a few of the old-style content-based Google ads. I even bought things as a result of them. In the (roughly) 20 years since the DoubleClick acquisition and the move to profile-based ads, I haven't clicked on a single ad. No matter how much they heat the atmosphere to build a model of me, the model remains too much of a trailing indicator to be useful.

Advertisers know this, which is why they're increasingly focusing investment on 'native advertising' - ads that are directly embedded in relevant content so that you read / watch the promotion while consuming some content that's actually interesting / relevant to what you might want to buy now / soon.